Have you ever had a well-meaning AP rep delete a posted vendor invoice? Has your warehouse ever received an entire purchase order when only a partial quantity arrived? Do you wish you had access to a copy of a purchase order after it has been fully received and invoiced? Or maybe you’ve accidentally landed on the purchases & payables setup page and aren’t sure what some of the fields mean. Read on to learn three tips on the functionality behind the purchase & payables setup in Dynamics 365 Business Central, and how you can leverage settings to prevent mishaps that happen to the best of us.

Note: This blog focuses on the Purchase & Payables setup, but the concepts in this document also apply to Sales & Receivables.

Default Qty to Receive

The Default Qty to Receive field has two settings: Remainder and Blank.

Most users have this field set to Remainder. This means that the quantity to receive field on your purchase order will always default to the remaining quantity on the order (quantity less quantity shipped).

If you frequently receive partial orders, or you have experienced errors with posting incorrect quantities, consider updating the setting on this field to Blank. This will require your user to enter the quantity to receive on each line prior to posting.

Archive Orders

When the Archive Quotes and Orders field is disabled, unless you have manually archived a copy of your purchase order using the action in the order ribbon, your original PO document is no longer available to view once your order has been fully received and invoiced. By enabling this field, NAV will automatically archive these documents, and your original document will be available for reference in the Purchase Order Archives list page.

Allow Document Deletion Before

While there is no risk of impacting your G/L by doing so, it is possible to delete a posted vendor invoice document from NAV. By populating the Allow Document Deletion Before field, you can prevent a user from either accidentally deleting a posted document or deleting a document because they believe this action reverses the G/L entry. If you wish to allow some documents to be deleted to reduce clutter (or even potentially increase performance if you have large volumes of data bogging down your system) enter your cut-off date in this field. If you want to prevent all purchase documents from being deleted, enter the date of your earliest posted document.

Testing before Production:

Making changes to these set-ups in a test environment and executing a testing plan against each of these changes prior to updating production is a great way to ensure that changes have the intended impact for your business. Additionally, business process mapping with documentation on these set-ups and set up decisions is an opportunity to structure these updates within NAV and educate users on these settings. For questions on these and other set-up changes – reach out to our team at Stoneridge Software for support.

For more information on the Purchase & Payables set-up – visit these Microsoft Docs pages: